Dragging Me Places
by FeralRaziel
Summary: Random fic I had done for Creative Writing. Dimension skipping abound and also....HYLDEN!


I was perusing through my fanfiction and found this lovely thing that had actually been an assignment for Creative Writing XD

So I figured, 'What the hell. I feel kind of guilty about writing and drawing so much Naruto and I miss my LoK sometimes!'

**Dragging Me Places**

Not but an hour ago, the land had violently expelled the last breath of health it will have ever taken. Now the land of Nosgoth was slowly dying, all because of one man. The epitome of this crumbling chaos stood on the balcony of a long-abandoned citadel, knowing full well what he had done, having come back to this moment from several centuries in its future.

He stood tall in the face of this and looked down on the landscape and loose strands of his long, white hair danced with the wind across his heavily framed face. His yellow eyes flickered in deep thought as he crossed his arms over his broad, deep-bronze chest. The only thing on his mind: "What do I do now?"

In the midst of this quietness a loud crackling made him turn on his heels. What seemed to be a portal had appeared. He was only half surprised at this, as these things happened more often than not. A nightmarish ghoul was projected from the portal: slightly more surprising. It landed on its knees and slid across the stone, tattered, useless wings trailing behind it. "Raziel…" he murmured.

The skeletal blue wraith that was Raziel made a noise like an angry wet cat. He saw the wraith's claws bound behind it before he was tackled to the dusty floor by several assailants. Snapping out of what had been serenity, he swung his arm and raked one or two of his attackers with his claws. One uttered what he assumed was a curse in a different language. He got to his feet.

Looking up he realized these attackers were Hylden: an ancient race of beings none too happy about his existence. He also realized that there seemed to be a legion of them filling the room. As he drew his sword some very angry little thing in the back of his head heatedly suggested he just kill himself now.

Hylden were falling with every swing he took. However, they only continued coming. He tore into the jugular of one with his fangs and drained the thing of blood. He had hoped this would deter its friends, but still they came. He grabbed the closest one by the bony crown framing its skull and flung it into the landscape below. He was slowing down by the next few minutes, of which felt like hours.

"Kain! You- " he looked up at the sound of his name. Raziel had shouted to him from the same spot in which had landed. Kain merely had time to cock his head in question before the balcony railing fell away. He plunged backwards. A few Hylden chuckled. One of them sighed angrily and back handed its companion.

There was a pause, followed by a throng of bats flapping loudly up the balcony's edge and into the room. The bats settled in the back of said room and, forming together, became Kain. "Bloody vampires." Said a random Hylden. Its glowing green eyes widened and it dropped to the ground unmoving. Kain laughed, Raziel chuckled, and the Hylden proceeded to subdue the vampire. Passing back into the portal, one Hylden grabbed the chains on the wraith. Raziel was tipped onto his back as he was pulled along. "I wish you people would stop dragging me places." He said. The Hylden leading him laughed and said something Raziel did not understand. That was followed by, "You can wish many things, but it won't make a difference."

Kain awoke in a cold dark chamber. The brittle stone was so dry his skin caught on it. There were a couple of Hylden guards standing outside the blockaded exit. "Well, this is a rather cliché situation." He said aloud.

"Talk to yourself like that regularly, do you?" came a voice. Raziel was in the corner with his knees pulled to his chest and his wings pooled around him. "No, I just…it…how are you even here?" Kain asked. When Raziel stared at him inquisitively with his blank, phosphorous glowing eyes Kain said, "Last I checked, you were imprisoned in the Reaver." As he spoke, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate his sword, but realized that the Hylden must've taken it.

"Well thank you for telling me that. I sure have something to look forward to now, aside from being dragged places by a hostile species." Raziel remarked. Kain was too mentally flustered by the absence of the Reaver blade to pay any attention to the piteous wraith. The Hylden had taken the Reaver before, when Kain was over an entire millennium younger. He had ended up committing genocide to get it back. It seemed the Hylden had outsmarted him.

As he thought, the barrier at the entrance of the chamber dissipated. A Hylden stepped into the doorway. It caught hold of the chains on Raziel's wrists and proceeded to drag him out of the room. "I _have_ legs!" the wraith exclaimed as he was taken from view. "Where are you taking him? How did you even get a hold of him in the first place?!" Kain asked of the guards after the barrier had flickered back into existence. The guards remained silent. Kain fixed them with a glare and sat back down. "Why is it that I can never get answers the easy way?" he spat under his breath.

"Nothing is easy." A hoarse voice came from behind him. A Hylden melded out of the shadows of the chamber. "Why are you in here?" Kain asked of this new Hylden, in a tired drawl. It didn't speak. "Well?" he inquired again, sneering. "Treason." It rasped ominously. There was a long grating pause.

"The SoulReaver…" It said. "What about it?" Kain asked, thinking of his sword. "What about _him_..." It responded, referring to Raziel. "They snatched him from the timeline, like they did to you." It continued.

"This was before his sacrificial epiphany, I would assume." Kain nodded, remembering how his sword had literally absorbed Raziel shortly before this incident began. The Hylden nodded. Kain was about to say something else when his wrists were shackled behind him. He scowled at the guard nearest with utmost hatred, but it only said, "Thak'tule! Get back, traitor." The other guard babbled in their language to the treasonous prisoner, apparently called Thak'tule.

They forced Kain to his feet and out of the chamber. As they led him down a hall he realized how very much he wanted to kill somebody right now. However, the more he thought about it the more tired he became. This was not like him. His shackles had glowing green runes engraved in them, and that was a good enough explanation of his sapped energy for him.

After a minute or so Kain could swear all of their hallways were the same. The runes seemed to have worn off because the monotony of these halls, of this situation, of his destiny-chasing, angered him. So he did something about it. He brought his arms up swiftly and caught a guard under the chin. Its trachea broke the chains. As the first guard dropped to its knees gurgling, Kain put up a hand and closed it into a fist, thusly crushing the second guard's ribcage with telekinesis.

Just then Thak'tule came shuffling around the corner with the Reaver in his gnarled hands. Kain seized it and pinned the Hylden to a wall with his forearm. "You are getting me out of here." Kain snarled. "But…what will you do?" It choked. "I don't know…but we'll figure it out now won't we?" he smiled evilly and dropped the Hylden back to its digigrade feet.

Thak'tule put up little resistance. When the two were out of the unfathomably humongous building in which they had been, Kain had to stop. Behind him were Hylden camps. In front of him were the twisting canyon paths and, beyond that, his sanctuary. After causing the decay of all of Nosgoth, Kain ruled it in its ruin as a vampire king. What had been his sanctuary was now being defended by what was left of the vampire clans from the hordes upon hordes of Hylden.

Perhaps things would've turned out better if he would have stayed here and not gone looking for his destiny and jumping through the time stream as he pleased. "The King, he's in…" Thak'tule stopped when Kain tossed him a venomous glance, but continued when he looked away. "He is in there, by the Pillars." In the silence that followed, Kain registered the hate with which Thak'tule had said _Pillars_. Of course he would curse them, the edifices of Nosgoth's very existence that had bound the Hylden to a different realm. And of course now that Nosgoth was decimated, the Pillars barely stood, crumbling with decay and neglect of righteousness.

So Kain pulled Thak'tule along through the battlefields. At the frontlines, where the species clashed, they spotted Raziel. He was picking his way through the vampires, some of which had been his kin at one point. A particularly large vampire spotted the wraith and ran its saber through his skull. Raziel swayed, then fell. Kain scoffed in disgust. The Hylden were using Raziel's pure immortality to gain them the bigger advantage.

Kain continued, but lost Thak'tule somewhere along the way. He assumed his vampire kin had gotten a hold of the wretched thing. Kain shrugged this off and swung wide the rusted doors to the sanctuary. The Pillars bent, as blighted as ever. The ghost Ariel was still there, Kain having practically damned her to haunt the Pillars for eternity. She pointed. He followed her finger.

The ever-ominous sounding King was sitting in what was once Kain's throne. It was a highly decorated Hylden. It was garbed in fine silk and dyed iron, the natural bone crest on its skull was bedecked with jewels and spheres of color. Kain drew his sword and stepped closer to it. It smirked as much as it could without lips.

"You didn't listen. Why did you never listen?" Ariel lamented. "Quiet you whore!" Kain snapped at her. The ghost woman glowered and faded into the realm of the dead. The Hylden King laughed at this and stood.

"So the infamous Kain, Scion of Balance, King of Vampires, thinks he can defeat an entire population of us, does he?" It said wickedly. "Perhaps just your head on a platter will do." Kain responded. "Face it, little vampire. We have taken over. The rest of your pathetic children are being slaughtered. I was thinking we could save some and bargain them off as slaves, what do you say?" It said with one of its four knobbed fingers on its chin in thought.

Kain remained still as death. Still the Hylden King continued in its monologue. "You have lost, Kain. It is Fate. It is destiny. You have no choice." It drew a gold-embroidered dagger, but Kain rushed it. He knocked the King to the floor and tore its face with a sweep of his 3-clawed hand. It sputtered but kicked Kain off with its powerful, dog-jointed legs. The Reaver blade slid across the floor and stirred up long settled dust.

Kain got back to his feet and rushed the King again, tearing the breastplate from its garment in an attempt to get at its heart. The armor clattered to the floor as the Vampire King lifted the Hylden King by the throat, ready to rip some vital organ from its body. Then there was a sudden rush of pain as if…

Kain looked down. The blade end of the Reaver was gleaming from his chest. His eyes widened with disbelief, then clouded red with a maddening rage. He turned on the one who impaled him, dropping the King to the ground. Thak'tule cowered away from him. Kain struck the Hylden to the wall, then the floor. Falling to his knees, he crushed Thak'tule's skull under his palm. His hate was already dissipating as his lids got heavier.

The Hylden King laughed voraciously. When Kain did not turn around the King strolled in front of him. "This is perfect irony isn't it? To be killed by your own legendary sword?" It said and its face contorted into a cruel smile. "More ironic still, that a vampire shall die by having all his blood taken from him in turn." It chuckled at this.

It was right. The Reaver was legendary for a reason. Aside from being indestructible, the blade was endowed with a magic that allow it to leech blood from the bodies of any it lacerated or impaled. The sword was like an inanimate vampire in itself.

With every beat of his undead heart, Kain's blood was absorbed by the metal blade. He didn't notice the King stop chuckling. He didn't notice Raziel dart in the room. He didn't notice the soul devouring wraith tear the ribcage half from the Hylden's body. He didn't notice Raziel's exclamation of shock. He didn't notice how he was noticing less and less and less.

Sound stopped registering. Soon thereafter, his sight stopped registering. His heart stopped. All he could do was hope he had done _something_ right, at least one thing. But then all thought stopped, because the dead can not register anything and all hope is extinguished along with life.

Several Hylden soldiers entered the sanctuary to find one of their own dead on the floor, Kain dead on the floor, their King dead and bleeding on the floor and Raziel standing, quite aggrieved, in the middle of them. Not knowing what to do, they gathered up the corpses and re-shackled Raziel. One soldier grabbed the chains and dragged Raziel along as they went for some counsel.

It was a rather long way to the Hylden council. The coarse rock of the path sloughed muscle from what was left of the wraith's back. "I wonder if any of you will ever realize that I have miraculous things called _legs_ that I can _walk on_……" He stated halfway through the trip. "You've got quite the mouth on you for something that's got no jaw." His captor said. His fellow soldiers laughed and said something in a different language.

Tired of this, of all of this, Raziel broke his own thumb in order to get the shackles off. He did this extraordinarily quickly and dashed for a path only remembered by him. The Hylden gave chase, but lost him soon. Tired, disgruntled, and cursing obscenely, they resumed their own path to the council.

Raziel made his way to a long forgotten Time Streaming chamber. With this, he could go anywhere in Nosgoth's history or future…if he knew how to work it. Any time was better than now. Could he go back and fix things? Was there anything he could even do? Of course there was. There had to be. "Fate is _wrong_. There is _always_ a choice." Raziel said to himself and activated the device.

_**THE END**_

sorry if you eyes bled! too lazy to fix formatting

All rights to The Legacy of Kain videogame series, characters, locations and events © Edios and Crystal Dynamics…no matter what I think


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